Torino iru Cafe

Please don't go here. If you have empathy for the suffering of animals chained in a basement, your heart will only break to see them like this and the images will burn into your memory. Yes, people do far worse things to animals every day. That doesn't make what's happening here right. I went here mostly ignoring animal activist concerns thinking "whatever, people can have owls as pets and it's not a big deal." While that may still be true, this is not one of those places.

My first signal that something was off should have been the fact that this is in a cramped basement. The staff are friendly and seem to treat the animals nicely and clean up after them properly. But don't let these things fool you: the owls are placed in a line on a perch with their legs chained so they can move no more than a few inches. They barely have enough space to stretch their wings, let alone get a reprieve if they're tired. These are also nocturnal birds, so that can't help.

Going into the "parrot room" the birds have a much larger space to fly around freely. Which is fine. They seem mostly fine except for a handful of sick birds. It's crowded in here, but the room is effectively a cage larger than most domestic birds have anyway... except for one Kea parrot in the corner. Until this point I was having a great time, even after seeing the owls, but seeing the Kea was awful. This is one of the most social, smart birds that exists. They are extremely curious and as a result, pretty destructive. They're not suitable as pets.

The Kea's presence in the basement was not the big problem... the problem was that it's in the corner, stuffed into a cage barely large enough for its body -- it certainly cannot stretch its wings fully. The cage is backed into a corner in such a way that it's not clear that the bird is ever let out. As you approach it, the Kea nips at the bars as if begging to be let out. It has no toys or any form of entertainment to stay occupied. All I could think about was the episode of Black Mirror where the woman's consciousness is downloaded into a teddy bear and all she can do to interact with the outside world is say "I need a hug" or "I love you" for all eternity while quietly going insane on the inside.

Let me caveat: there are probably places that are the best of both worlds in terms of animal comfort and giving people the opportunity to interact with them. But this isn't one of them.